Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Toresetre/Concert photography at music festivals

Hi Toresetre. Thanks for submitting this grant request. Your photographs are great and we are definitely interested in supporting your project. We do have a few questions below and would appreciate your response.

One of your stated goals is to focus on female artists. It would be great to have a target in terms of number of female artists documented or percentage of the total photographs.
Thank you for providing the link to your announcement at Wikimedia Norway. For this type of project we are very interested in understanding how much the community is interested in the content and the likelihood that it will be used on Wikimedia projects. It looks like your photographs from 2015, 2016, and the concert category have a usage rate of 16-23%. Your measures of success have a usage rate of 20% on the high end. We encourage you to think about more outreach activities to get the photos in use. This can be as simple as letting people know they are on Commons through different social media channels, or even helping to organize an editathon focused on musicians.
850 NOK (~100 USD) per night for accommodation seems quite high. Have you looked into alternatives?
Please update the start date to the time you expect to start spending grant funds.

Thanks! Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Alex Wang

Thank you for your kind words. I've addressed your comments and questions below.

1) So there are a couple of way you can look at measuring how this project is reducing the gender gap in Wikipedia. This project will contribute to reducing the gender gap by making sure that concerts with female artists or bands are covered and photographed. Since we're not influencing the festival bookings, the metric should focus on the gender ratio of the uploads, compared the the gender ratio of the festival. For reporting, I can create a report of the number of booked male, female and mixed band/artists. So if 60% of the bookings are of female artists, 60% or more of the concerts photographed should be of female artists.

2) Very good input and I'll consider how we can achieve this. Both using multiple channels (social media) and editathon are good ways on increasing contributions. A project like this goes through some executing phases and community should be involved in most of these. To add to the application, there are a couple of ways we can get involvement from the community:

When planning:

1 Involve the community in what festivals and bands to cover.

Before festival season, post notices on the projects boards and ask community to identify festivals and bands that can benefit from running the project.

In post-processing phases:

2 increase the quality of the meta data. Use the community for activities like:

improve the description of the photographs
identify unknown artists at stage
add categories to photographs

3 increase the usage of photographs

encourage the community to pick and use images in existing articles
encourage the community to start articles on festivals, bands and artists.

4 solicit feedback from the community

for the final report, ask the community for feedback and comments on the project and project outcome

3) The hotel room is of modest standard and I would say that you would have difficulties finding a hotel room in Norway any lower than USD 100. Kristiansand is a small town and this festival brings in 5.000-10.000 guests each day so the hotel rates will be high. Last time I check the few last rooms in the city were going for USD 275.

4) The festivals that require funding have taken place by now and I have photographed most of the concerts at the two festivals. The end date in October is to leave enough time for post processing, upload and reporting. Take note that the original request for funding (TPS) was placed before the festivals occurred.

I hope this answers your questions and look forward to hearing from you.

Toresetre (talk) 12:58, 20 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

Hi Toresetre. I appreciate the thoughtful responses to my question, especially around community engagement in terms of selecting topics (festivals, musicians) and integrating content. My understanding is that the concerts already happened. Is that correct? If yes, please know that in future we do not typically consider retroactive grant submissions. However, we are making an exception since there was a misunderstanding regarding if you should apply for TPS or a Rapid Grant. Looking forward to seeing the photos! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:45, 22 July 2016 (UTC)Reply